Riots

Living apart

A MONTH after Asian and white youths rioted on three hot nights in the northern industrial town of Oldham, the temperature rose again, and it was Burnley's turn. The sequence of events in both places—from minor incident to major riot in minutes—was very similar, as are the conditions in which the violence flared—segregated white and brown people united only by suspicion of each other.

As in most northern towns, Burnley's 6,000 Asians, about 7% of the population, moved into late-19th-century terraced housing when they arrived in the 1950s and 1960s. They clustered together, like Jewish or Irish arrivals in Britain before them, more secure among their own people. But unlike previous arrivals, Asians do not seem to have spread out across their adopted towns. Nor did the local councils, which used to control much of the housing in these areas, succeed in reducing segregation. Both Burnley and Oldham have neighbourhoods where the population, and school rolls, are over 90% Asian.

Much of this is explained by colour prejudice. The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) says that discrimination by private and public landlords, and by estate agents, meant that immigrants stayed in their enclaves. Although much of this was exposed and stamped out in the 1970s and 1980s, some discrimination continued into the 1990s. In 1993 the CRE found that Oldham's council was offering Asians inferior or segregated housing.

Economics trapped the Asians, too. The collapse of labour-intensive textile manufacture meant that few had enough money to trade up the local housing ladder. And because white people did not want to move into Asian areas, the price of Asians' houses stayed low, preventing them from selling up and moving out.

These days, says the CRE, fear of white racial harassment is also keeping the brown people corralled. Asian fears that the police are not exactly colour-blind seemed justified when Shahid Malik, a member of the CRE and of Labour's national executive committee, was injured in clashes on June 25th. He claimed that while trying to calm things down, he was hit in the face and knocked unconscious by a policeman wielding a riot shield.

Discrimination and racial harassment were both highlighted as problems in a report into council housing in Bradford, published last week by the Chartered Institute of Housing. It asked why social housing is taken up by so few of Bradford's Asians. Here again, minority groups were found to fear vandalism and racial abuse if they took up council housing in white estates, although the report also noted their wish to remain near their families wherever they moved, which may have sustained racial divisions. More disturbingly, the report found evidence of “block busting”. When Asians try to move into white areas, some estate agents reportedly warn white residents of a potential threat to their house prices. The estate agents thus generate sales, while the whites leave the area.

Oldham council has only recently started to tackle the suspicion that segregation generates by, for example, pairing primary schools so that children can learn more about people of another colour. But nobody thinks there is a quick solution. Richard Knowles, the council leader, admits it may take 25 years before the root causes of the problem are overcome.

Still, it can be done. Leicester, where brown and black faces were 28% of the population in 1991 and may be more than 50% by 2011, was labelled Britain's most racist city 30 years ago. Local newspapers carried adverts telling immigrants to stay away, and racist organisations like the National Front were active.

But Leicester, a more prosperous place than the riotous towns of the north-west, has changed. In Burnley, a British National Party candidate got 11% of the vote in this year's general election. In Oldham, two BNP candidates got 11% and 16% of the vote. In Leicester, the BNP man got 2%.